Pattern-Fray

Overview

Pattern-fray is the one sickness that belongs to the Wrought. They take no fever, flux, poison, or bad air of flesh, but they are not beyond harm: a Wrought kept from rest, or driven and refitted as a tool, begins to come loose inside. The Wrought call it fraying, and they fear it less as a sickness than as a sign of how they are being treated.

Cause

A Wrought person is worked material joined to a persistent inner pattern, and most need periods of stillness in which that pattern settles, which they call rest though it is not sleep. Kept from rest too long, worked without pause in heat and strain, or refitted and altered without consent, the pattern does not settle and begins to slip. What sustains the pattern differs by lineage, and artificers still argue it; what unsettles it is better known.

Who It Strikes

Only the Wrought take it. It is commonest among war-frames held in service, estate-bound frames worked through every season, and forge and mine Wrought on long shifts. Free Wrought who keep their own hours seldom fray, except in an emergency that no one else could work through.

Signs and Course

It begins with small things: a tremor in a joint that does not come from wear, a pause before answering, a word or a name lost and found again. Then come repeated motions, a hand that finishes a gesture twice, a task begun again from its start. Sensor marks fail by turns, so that sight dims or a voice plate rasps and steadies. Memory slips grow worse, and a frayed Wrought may wake from rest unsure of the day or the place.

Given safe rest, most mend over days or weeks. Driven on, a Wrought begins to fall into a stillness that is not rest and from which it is hard to wake. The last stage is a shattered pattern, which is death.

Contagion

It does not pass between Wrought or to anyone else.

Treatment and Its Limits

Rest mends most of it: stillness in a safe place, long enough, under the eyes of those the Wrought trusts. Repair by a trusted artificer, treated as bodily care rather than maintenance, steadies loosened joints and failing marks. The repair houses of the Mending Orders keep both. Memory lost in a fray can sometimes be recovered with the help of companions who remember what the Wrought did and said.

Refitting a frayed Wrought to make it work again, without its consent, deepens the fray and is a violation in itself. The healing workings of flesh find little to work on here. Vital Magic reaches a Wrought's living pattern only weakly, so some healers can ease a fray, settling the slip and the tremor a little; the frame itself is still mended by artificers.

Mortality

Most frays mend fully with rest. A long or repeated one can leave lasting repeated motions or gaps of memory. A fray driven to its end shatters the pattern and kills as surely as any wound.

Lore and Belief

Owners and some workshops call it wear, and treat it with a refit. Some frightened temples have taken it for a frame sliding back into a tool, and argued that awakening was never real. Among the Wrought, a fray is told as evidence of harm done, and the first-awakened remember the denial years as years of fraying.

In the Medieval Era

Pattern-fray is met in the hot forge levels of the Stonewake Deeps, where the most dangerous labour falls to Wrought and to frames that never woke, on estates, and in war service. Where the Wrought have kin or patrons strong enough to press it, a fray is treated as a harm owed care, and a fray caused by forced work as a wrong to be paid for. Elsewhere it is still called wear.

Where It Appears

This ailment grows out of:

• The Wrought (bodies and continuity; rest; repair, rights, and recognition)
• The Mending Orders
• Predecessor-Frames